Add a new page

As you analyze the reading, I ask that discussion groups select three to five keywords. In defining the keywords, please avoid reproducing dictionary definitions.

While the criteria for selecting keywords are yours to develop, I ask that the keywords selected provide continuity, variety and inclusiveness. The inspiration for this part of the assignment comes from Raymond Williams Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976). Williams describes his approach:

" … It is not a dictionary or glossary of a particular academic subject. It is not a series of footnotes to dictionary histories or definitions of a number of words. It is, rather, the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions, in English, of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society … I called these words Keywords in two connected senses: they are significant, binding words in certain activities and their interpretation; they are significant, indicative words in certain forms of thought. Certain uses bound together certain ways of seeing culture and society, not least in these two most general words. Certain other uses seemed to me to open up issues and problems, in the same general area, of which we all needed to be very much more conscious. Notes on a list of words; analyses of certain formations: these were other elements of an active vocabulary — a way of recording, investigating and presenting problems of meaning in the area in which the meanings of culture and society have formed" (emphasis mine, 13).

From the assigned, or related, reading, then, I ask that discussion groups choose three to five keywords, no more. You may develop a longer entry on one or two keywords and develop a new, or integrated, entry on a previously selected keyword. These keywords should have a common usage (are part of our "general discussions"), but may be given a particular technical or disciplinary definition by the writer. I want you to provide brief entries — 250 to 500 words — for each keyword.

I do not want you to mimic Williams' style or concerns, rather I ask that you offer "the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary" originating in your mind, our reading and our discussion. Ultimately, I want us to build a vocabulary that lends an evolving basis for our shared inquiry.

Please post your keywords to the appropriate wiki forum no later than 6 p.m. on Friday (the Friday before we discuss the readings on Tuesday).